Bob Garfield

For the past 17 years, Bob Garfield has co-hosted the Peabody Award-winning public radio program on the media, cleverly titled On the Media. He is the creator of the Audible Channels program The Genius Dialogues, and was founding co-host of Slate’s Lexicon Valley.

A heroic multimediocrity, Bob has been a columnist or contributing editor for the Washington Post Magazine, MediaPost, The Guardian, Advertising Age, Civilization and the op-ed page of USA Today. He has also written for The New York Times, Playboy, Atlantic, Sports Illustrated, Wired and the Mainichi Shimbun and been employed variously by ABC, CBS, CNBC and the defunct FNN as an on-air analyst. As a lecturer and panelist, he has appeared in 37 countries on six continents. He wrote one episode of a short-lived NBC sitcom, Sweet Surrender, and co-wrote a song recorded by Willie Nelson. (Long story.) Bob is the NYT worst-selling author of five books, including his comic mob thriller Bedfellows, which is somewhat comic and somewhat thrilling. His touring one-man-show Ruggedly Jewish is coming soon to a city near you.

Bob is the founding director of the annual Media Future Summit, recent visiting lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication and a senior fellow at SEI Center for Advanced Studies in Management at Penn’s Wharton School. An Ikea bookcase (Billy, birch veneer) in his basement is filled with trophies.